Vicarious Visions on Spider-Man 2, Part II

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The second of our two-part interview with the Nintendo DS developer. And new Spidey screens too!

By Interview by Craig Harris

The following is the continuation of our interview with Nintendo DS and Game Boy Advance developer Vicarious Visions, the studio responsible for the dual-screen version of Spider-Man 2 due for release with the launch of the system on November 21st.

The questions were fielded by VV CEO, Karthik Bala, as well as Spider-Man 2's lead designer, Jorge Diaz. the first part of our interview can be found right here.

IGN: Did you guys have any ideas for the DS that you thought, "Great, but wouldn't the game still be good without them on a lesser system?"

Jorge: That's a great question. Yes, a lot of the ideas that we came up with are definitely possible on other systems, but they wouldn't execute as well on them. Sure, you can do a lot of stuff with the D-Pad, but when you're fighting Vulture and Mysterio and Doc Ock, and things are coming out at you, and you're touching the screen to fight back, you're kind of glad you have two thumbs. (laughs) Spider-Man 2 uses a lot of animation and moves for the main character and enemies, and moving to 3D gave us a lot more memory to store all the moves for everyone. Now you can swap textures, which is obviously something you can't do on GBA.

Karthik: Somebody at the conference asked: couldn't you have done this game with sprites on the GBA? And as I said, actually, no, because of the sheer number of animation frames in the game, the game wouldn't be nearly as smooth with all the turns and camera angles. There are 4000 key frames of animation, and we're doing interpolation between them. You can break out of one move and go into another, like web swinging and jumping out of it to web-zip to the ceiling, which I was trying to demonstrate that at the Summit. You get much faster response times this way. I think the combat experience becomes more fluid because we get a lot more "buttons" with the touch screen. That layout, or what we call the "Buffet of Moves" on the DS screen is really convenient.

IGN: Is there some sort of approval process, either by you guys, your publisher, or even Nintendo that says, "Yeah, great ideas, but why don't you just do the game on the GBA instead?"

Karthik: There's no regulation that we're aware of. It's more self-regulated, because you'll end up getting panned if the gamers ask "why is this on the DS?" If it doesn't take advantage of the system, gamers will know. Now that we understand what the system is capable of doing, we set the bar at a certain level internally, and our future titles need to go way above that. We're constantly asking ourselves things like: explain why this idea is important for the DS and why we couldn't do this elsewhere. That's a very critical design question.

Jorge: In a design atmosphere, you can always find different ways to represent the same effect in a different medium. We know how to take a console game and turn it into a GBA game or even a cellphone game, that's what we do. And we've been able to bring console elements on the GBA and make them work on less powerful hardware. When developing on the DS, we were constantly asking ourselves, "Why would you want to do this like that?" And to be honest, the answer always came back "It's going to make the game feel different. It's not going to be the same."

Karthik: I think there's value in interesting and unique gameplay. Yoshi's Touch and Go is a great example of that, where you're literally drawing "collision" on the screen and controlling the characters indirectly. That's a different kind of game, something you really couldn't do on GBA or whatever. There are a lot of ideas to be explored with the touch screen and "indirect" control. Chu Chu Rocket comes to mind.

Jorge: We looked at Internet flash games when coming up with ideas for the touch screen. Obviously the touch screen works like a mouse, so we were trying to explore what had been done there already. There was this one game we saw that had these balloons that you had to circle to get points which was amazingly addictive. Something like that would be much better with a touch screen. But we were limited with the amount of time we had with Spider-Man 2, so we're really looking forward to our future games to really get to work on these ideas we came up with.